Before we started our calendar, we asked for links to under-represented data
journalism stories. That's how we found out about this great
project by Hannah Lesch and her colleagues-slash-fellow-students at
FINK.HAMBURG. So this one is for
anyone else just starting out: Hannah recounts the experience
of working on her first-ever data journalism project.

Weekend seminars are not cool, seriously. You don't get to sleep in and you
can‘t spend your day comfortably on the sofa. Instead, you're at
university. But the data journalism course with Marcel Pauly, editor
at Spiegel Online, still managed to get all of us into the Newsroom
of FINK.HAMBURG on a Saturday morning.

I study Digital Communication at the University of Applied Sciences in
Hamburg. In this context, I also work for the digital urban magazine
FINK.HAMBURG. In the data journalism seminar, our task for the
weekend is to implement a story based on data. Astrid Benölken,
Tobias Zuttmann, Lennart Albrecht and I get together in a small
group. We want to research something about the prisons in Hamburg:
How has their occupancy rate changed in recent years? How about the
proportion of foreigners? What are the consequences of these
developments?

The idea is simple, but the implementation is complicated. We hope for a
large table with all the data on prisons in Hamburg, but quickly, it
becomes clear: There is no collection of data on the Hamburg prisons.
After some unsuccessful attempts to get raw data from authorities, we
put the information together from hundreds of minor enquiries
(“Kleine Anfragen”) to the Hamburg Senate. We work with PDF
documents and transfer most of the data by hand because they can not
be easily copied into Excel. Only later will we learn about the tool
Tabula,
which would have spared us some hours of work and many unnecessary
typos. Programs like Tabula allow you to extract tables from PDF
documents.

Bad mood due to overcrowding

Even if it is an annoying job: Hidden in the minor enquiries is, in part,
very curious data. We now know that in one detention center, the
administration regularly confiscates yeast dough, and that inmates
get meticulously rationed fruit: half a kiwi per week, for example.
After we have transferred all the data, we realize: Some periods of
time are missing. For these precise time periods, we ask the judicial
authority for data – and manage to almost complete our table. In
general, searching databases is worthwhile for us: on "World
Prison Brief", for example, we find statistics on the occupancy
rate in prisons worldwide, and on the site of the Federal
Statistical Office, we get supplementary data on the
prison system.

When analyzing the data in Excel, we immediately see: Every prison in
Hamburg is currently overcrowded. But we also realize: we have no
idea about how prisons work, their administration and organization,
and urgently need information from experts to classify our results.
We speak with a representative of the prisoners' union GG/BO, a
professor of criminology at the University of Hamburg, the press
office of the judicial authority of the city of Hamburg and the
chairman of the Confederation of Prison Staff in Hamburg.

For the talks, we bring our preliminary results – graphically processed
and presented clearly, of course. The experts not only help us review
our findings, they also open our eyes to stories that we did not
recognize before.

From an occupancy rate of 90%, a prison is considered overcrowded. The
prisoners feel this in everyday life: there wouldn't be enough
opportunities for the prisoners to work, the times in which they can
move outside their cells would be cut and leisure activities
canceled, says Bras Dos Santos, spokesman for the prisoners' union.
"You can feel the mood in the prison becoming increasingly
aggressive from this point."

We present our results using the tools Datawrapper, Thinglink, Adobe
Illustrator and Piktochart – and are surprised how easy it is.
Finally, fellow students from the Illustration studies at our
university even create a custom header image for our article.

After a few weeks of work, we draw our conclusion. Even though it was
difficult to find data at first, we found out much more than
expected. Looking back, the research may have been exhausting,
time-consuming and sometimes really annoying – but it definitely
paid off. The exciting and fun part for us was the evaluation: over
and over again we compared different parameters and discovered new
stories in our dataset. For the most part, the experts were also very
cooperative and open – especially after they had seen that we had
already researched the data in depth. An especially nice moment for
us was seeing the combination of the illustrations, our graphics and
the text – and, of course, the moment in which we were finally able
to upload the resulting piece.

Scouring the data got us hooked. That's why we're currently working on our
next data-journalistic project – although, this time, not on the
weekend.

About

Hannah Lesch

Hannah Lesch, born in 1994, is a science journalist and is currently
studying "Digital Communication" in the Master's Degree at
the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. She prefers to work on
cultural and knowledge topics on a multimedia basis and discovered
her passion for media education at the Deutsche Welle Academy in a
year abroad in Namibia.

Runs on:

How many stickers do you have on your laptop?Not a single one, I like to put stickers on lampposts and toilet doors instead.

How many pie charts have you built?More than I can handle shots per evening.

How often do people use you as IT-Support? Nobody dares to make that mistake.

How many adapters do you have? I mainly collect adapters for power sockets – I have a set for the whole world and I'm going to use every single one at least once. ;)